Ultrahigh Temperature Materials

As a result of our past and ongoing involvement with an array of defense, industrial and high temperature materials development programs and manufacturing efforts, Exothermics has gained valuable expertise in producing many types of specialty metals, refractory compounds and nonoxide ceramics.

Most of our high-density materials are made by powder metallurgical (PM) processing, metallic encapsulation and hot isostatic pressing (HIP) or hot pressing, though we also frequently employ other green body forming and pressureless sintering processing methods. For specialty applications, we frequently synthesize our own powders to produce bulk articles. This results in improved ability to optimize the microstructure and purity of the final product for its intended application.

We have done a great deal of work in the past few years to develop fine-grained, near theoretically density ultrahigh temperature materials based on the Group IV and Group V nitrides, carbides, and borides and even cermet mixtures thereof. Materials such as TaC, HfC, HfB2, HfN and elemental boron are our particular specialties, but we have processed many other types of materials. The ultrahigh temperature materials development work we are involved with typically supports DoD efforts to field next-generation ultrahigh temperature materials for rocket/missile propulsion and hypersonic vehicle platforms, but many other markets can make use of this interesting, high performance family of materials.